Pages

Imagine the world without anger, without greed. We have the power, the tools, the skills and the resources right now to build a peaceful world, where people live in harmony with the Earth and each other. This blog explores ways we are doing just that, one post, one change, one day at a time. Join me. Tell your stories. Ask for help. Spread your ideas for making the vision real and, well, ordinary.

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Give. I know, I know. Tis the season. What else does one do this time of year? Look. Listen.

The food will give them physical nutrition. The love and affection that you show will give them mental nutrition. ... What is the ultimate purpose of life? It is to give. Start giving! See the joy of giving.

Narayanan Krishnan
from the video

What is your purpose?

Have you found your purpose in life? How do you feel in this moment? What does Krishnan's story evoke in you? What, if anything, will you change from this moment going forward?

It's only fair, if I ask those questions, that I answer them myself. My purpose is to do all I can to create the world of Ordinary now, and to build on the vision, that future generations might have a chance to live in a more fair, more just, more sustainable, more beautiful, more loving, more compassionate world than we create now.

In this moment, having just watched the video again, I feel joy at the thought of this man, like so many others round the world, seeing a need in his community and filling it. Doing what he can. This evokes in me a deep desire to continue with my efforts to give of my best skills and talents to change the world, in the ways that I know, in ways I have yet to discover.

I know I am not the person to feed, clothe, and bathe the hungry and the homeless, not yet anyway. Going forward, I will keep Narayanan Krisnan in my heart and this video in the side bar of my blog until I no longer need to be reminded every morning to stay on track, to do what I can, to increase the "what I can" as much as possible, and never to doubt that one person's actions, one person's gifts from her heart, from his heart, are enough.

Dear Mr. Narayanan Krishnan

Thank you for the love in your heart. Thank you for your willingness to touch and heal and feed and groom and hug and love. You are my personal hero today and every day. I pray that you have everything you need to continue your work, and that your body, heart and mind continue to be nourished in full measure.

With deepest gratitude to my good blogger friend Wanda for introducing me to to Narayanan Krishnan and his work on her always inspirational, frequently funny and ever life-affirming blog, What would Wanda do?.

6 comments:

Moving here, committing to the land, I thought I'd found my purpose. But the questioning doesn't end. What is the human role in the world? What is it to be fully human?

I was told..... the land misses us, mourns the loss of relationship. It is this longing FROM the land that pulls people back to the land - but they arrive, mystified, no longer willing/able to fulfill their role in the harmony of our world... and so the relationship fails because the humans don't know what to do, have lost their voice, their note in the harmony....and the land sinks into despondency.....

What is it, to be Fully Human and In Relationship with the Natural World? What is our role, the one that no other creature can do? What is our voice, the harmony that no other creature can offer?

Hayden, literally moments before reading your comment here, I received this quotation from Dick Hogan, an activist with the Four Years.Go. campaign. He quotes a man named Gary Snyder:

To restore the land one must live and work in a place. To work in a place is to work with others. People who work together in a place become a community, and a community, in time, grows a culture. To work on behalf of the wild is to restore culture.

Learn. Practice. Ask. Give.

Building Ordinary

Here we learn together how to build theVillage of Ordinary and to actualize its vision of a peaceful world. I deeply appreciate every comment you make, every example of ways you are building Ordinary in your life, and every suggestion for making Ordinary real in all our lives.

Follow Building Ordinary and stay in touch!

Search This Blog

Subscribe to Building Ordinary

About Me

This is not my time to stop and rest. This is my time to clean up the messes we've made and build a good world, not a better world, a good world. I do not want my grandchildren to think I did not do enough to prevent runaway global warming and create a better world for them and their children. Every day, I do what I can. Every web page, blog post and network contribution I make is part of that. Every dollar I spend--or choose not to spend--is part of that. Every light, every faucet, I turn on and off is part of that--or not!
Day by day, I am learning to make better choices. When they work for me, I share them that others might take heart as well.